In a slight change of communication strategy for our releases, from now on we will use
the “announce” mailing list only for announcements of final and stable versions.

LibreOffice 3.4 Beta 5 is
being announced on “projects”, “development” and “localization” mailing lists, in order to allow
volunteers to perform the QA process. Also, the beta has been pre-announced on the community mailing
lists for a first round of QA tests, to avoid the quality problems of the earlier 3.4 betas.

We feel that we
need to clarify a few points here:

1. LibreOffice is the result of a collaborative development effort, and
adopts a time based release model (such as other collaborative development projects like GNOME and
KDE). This is rather different from the past at OOo, where most of the development was happening
inside a closed group, and the time based release model frequently slipped.

2. LibreOffice is free software,
and is based on free tools. We are working to improve the day-to-day quality of our pre-release
builds for Windows, with an ongoing migration to GNU Make as a first step to more reliable
cross-compilations from Linux to Windows . Our aim, over time, is to make it easy to build releases
for LibreOffice for anyone with some time and a PC. This is rather different from the past at OOo,
where release builds came from a proprietary build environment run by a small team of build
engineers.

3.
Understanding the time based release model is critical to selecting the right release of LibreOffice
for each situation:

3.1. For the most conservative users, we recommend a commercially supported version,
which enables you to indirectly support the project’s development. Such stable versions will
typically be based on a point release, such as LibreOffice

3.3.2 today;

3.2. For those interested in the
bleeding edge, who want to enjoy new features and fixes, we recommend LibreOffice

3.4.0, release
candidates, betas or even nightly builds, which enable a participation in the development,
evaluation and quality control process;

3.3. Of course, as the 3.4 series matures, we will reach a point
where we will recommend a 3.4.x release as being suitable even for the most conservative
users.

This model
should be familiar to many, from other Free Software projects, with vendors providing distinctive
releases of the underlying software.

All this said, if you want to help us in building a more stable
LibreOffice 3.4, you are kindly invited to join the projects, development and/or localization
mailing lists and contribute to the process.